13 January 2011 2:24 PM

I say ‘come to loathe’. What I really mean is my vitriolic hatred for their crafty, subversive ways has returned with a vengeance.

I know millions of others out there feel the same. Not just about mobile providers, but all sorts of companies that don’t put customers first.

TalkTalk was the very worst of British firms in 2010, you told us. So we gave them our Wooden Spoon Award for their pathetic attempt (euphemism alert) at providing good service.

My particular issue is with Orange. My two-year-old contract finally comes to an end today. Instead of renewing it, I want to switch to Pay As You Go. So earlier this week – a full three days before my contract officially expired - I phoned Orange and told them.

28 May 2010 11:47 AM

Last week I had the chance to have a quick go on an iPad and a look at what it can do. So is it any good? Well here's a quick iPad review.

Well it certainly looks the part. You can see why the iPad has become such a lusted after item for must-have gadget freaks and Apple's cult-like following. It looks and feels lovely.

A similar size to an A4 writing pad its screen is just the write size for browsing, reading and watching.

Crucially it can sit nicely balanced on a hand and arm, in the way that a laptop cannot and you can see how it would be comfortable to sit reading or watching something, whether on the sofa or the move.

You could happily read a book, a newspaper, or the internet, in the same fashion that you lounge around with the Sunday papers.

17 September 2009 12:08 PM

Even stock markets aren’t safe from Twitter. StockTwits is apparently the place to be for traders looking for the latest gossip.

It should probably come as no surprise that traders are taking to social networking phenomenom Twitter.

A service that enables them to brag about prowess, gossip about stocks and trading systems and try to start a stampede or chase the herd, all in short sharp bursts, was bound to be popular.

Today’s FT reports that 90,000 traders from New York to London have signed up and are tweeting stock tips, trading tips and general opinions. They simply tweet their opinion, the stock’s ticker and a dollar sign, which is then picked up and displayed on the StockTwits website.

28 July 2009 5:40 PM

As the talk today turns to the official investigation into broadband speeds, or lack of them, I thought I'd share my experiences of switching broadband supplier.

In a country based on a service economy consisting largely of discretionary spending, it should be a source of national shame that we are criminally useless when it comes to service; particularly customer service.

The only way to cope - and it seems to me that companies positively encourage it - is to vote with our feet when things go wrong. And to do this is easier than you might think. Even with broadband.

The trouble with broadband is that it involves computers. And as everyone knows, the only people who know how computers work are either out to take you to the cleaners or are called Charles Babbage, and unfortunately he died in 1871.

I've switched internet service provider several times over the years from MSN to AOL, others I can't recall, to Virgin, where I stayed for about a decade of pretty reliable service - until it let me down.

I'd also decided it was time to dump BT. I felt its pricing and packages were becoming increasingly sneaky; a view rammed home when I received a quarterly phone bill of nearly £250 compared with a usual bill of around £65, including line rental. It left me with two options of interest: Tiscali, which also had an impressive TV on-demand service, and TalkTalk.

Tiscali was in the middle of takeover talks and there was a possibility that I'd switch and end up back with one of my erstwhile suppliers, so that left TalkTalk.

Oh God, no! Not TalkTalk! Not the company responsible for one of the great customer services disasters of recent years. But it was cheaper, loads cheaper, and the little money-saving light bulb in my head was flashing away. Surely, it couldn't still be that bad? There was only one way to find out.

Step 2: Repeated Step 1 about 50 billion times just to make sure I was doing the right thing

Step 3: I signed up and held my breath. And...

...that was pretty much all there was to it.

TalkTalk did the rest, efficiently with such a completely moron-friendly process that I defy anyone to be confused by it.

BT and Virgin were cancelled without my involvement. The box of goodies with software, wireless router and cables arrived earlier than expected, letters and emails kept me informed of the process along the way.

On the switch-over date, I plugged it all in and followed my easy-to-follow-even-for-morons instructions and within about 12 minutes I was a TalkTalk customer, paying £6.49 plus line rental a month for up to 8mb broadband, compared with £17.99 to Virgin plus surreal variations to BT. And my TalkTalk deal includes weekend and evening national phone calls and daytime local calls. The broadband speed is the same as Virgin but then I wasn't switching to improve the speed. This was about cash and service.

Now, a company is only as good as how it treats its customers when things go wrong and so far there's nothing much to report on this front. Nothing's gone wrong, although once, when I was unable to access the internet a little box came up saying something like:' This isn't working, try this,' which I did and it worked again.

Before switching I'd asked around and the feedback these days on TalkTalk is largely positive - a far cry from the days it was considered 'worse than British Gas'.

So if you don't have anyone to ask for their views on switching to TalkTalk, that's my story into the mix. And my conclusion is that if you feel you are being ripped off and want to change supplier, do it. It is very, very easy with TalkTalk and you could save hundreds of pounds a year.

(I should add if this tale all sounds rather servile, that I'm not in the pay of TalkTalk. Far from it. But hey, this is a tale of a customer in Britain who is happy with a service. It's surely worthy of a bit of praise.)

01 April 2009 9:31 AM

Feed up of those silent phone calls from marketing or sales people? A new website - www.whocallsme.com - has been launched that encourages people to report mystery calllers and then encourages other web users to shed light on who they might be. It's flagged up today in a teaser box in the Daily Mail by our colleagues on Money Mail.

I'm unsure who runs or backs the site but it's a great idea - that's because the numbers will come out high or top on Google and highly visible to recipients of the calls who go online to search the origin. Here's an example. Most of the entries on the site are foreign at the moment but there's likely to be far more UK numbers thanks to the Daily Mail plug.

10 February 2009 4:18 PM

Mobile phone provider Orange have added another 2 for 1 deal for their customers

Currently every Wednesday Orange mobile phone customers can get 2 for 1 deals on Odeon cinema tickets by texting ‘film’ to 241.

Now customers can also get a 2 for 1 meal voucher at PizzaExpress by going to the Orange website. The deal includes a 2 for 1 voucher on mail meals, plus two servings of either free garlic bread or dough balls, every Wednesday.

The deal is open Orange to pay monthly, pay as you go and broadband customers.

24 January 2009 11:01 AM

Oh dear. Something's gone wrong at Virgin Media. An as yet unidentified problem with the server that powers its PCguard security software means, according to the service desk, that most customers are going to find that their firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware and so on are disabled. You ain't protected. And the only way to fix it, I'm told, is to log in to Virgin's remote help where someone from Virgin can then log into your computer and sort it for you - and for every customer individually. Wow. **

You can phone the help desk on 0845 045 0001 but there's nothing they can do. In fact the first time I phoned, late Friday, a clearly bedraggled soul told me: 'Personally, you would be better off installing [the free anti-virus program] AVG. It does exactly the same thing as PCguard and it works. I can't see this being fixed.'

Every customer has somehow been given the same licence key (code) so as far as their computers are concerned every customer is trying to access more than the permitted number of copies and it crashes.

There's no detail of this on the Virgin Media service status page. Funny that.

** Updated Monday 2 Feb: An official Virgin spokesman has been in touch to say that this problem is only affecting about 100 customers. 'The situation occurs under certain specific circumstances such as when a customer tries to upgrade from PCGuard to PCGuard Total or has PCGuard Total already and tries to reactivate.'

As a long-standing Virgin customer I'm dismayed that the help desk got it so wrong - three times - because until now it has proved to be by far and away the best customer support service of all the communications companies quite possibly put together. Apparently it takes a while for the info to filter through the company to the guys who need it most. Frankly, I don't think that's good enough. But should I give TalkTalk a try out? Anyone?

13 June 2007 2:32 PM

While I am sure there are still a wealth of grifters out there working cons face-to-face, the automatic choice for the enterprising scammer nowadays must be the internet and mobile phone networks.

And while the advice is run a mile if anyone contacts you by email, text or phone call and claims to be offering you something too good to be true, there's a natural temptation to want that good deal to be true.

Two days ago I had one of those moments. A message arrived on my Orange pay-as-you-go mobile, promising me the holy grail for us pre-pay cheapskates - a phone upgrade.

For a brief time I honestly thought Orange was genuinely rewarding me for being too lazy to seek a better deal for the past however many years. And then the alarm bells rang. These were the tell tale signs:

1) Orange love to bombard customers with pointless messages, but they always begin Hi from Orange and the sender is always Orange.

2) Mobile phone companies are not in the business of rewarding pay-as-you-go customers for their loyalty - they might give you a free phone, but they want an 12/18-month contract in return.

3) In order to get this free upgrade you rang a normal 0207 phone number. Everyone knows big business dumped normal phone numbers years ago to milk customers dry with 0845 numbers.

Interested to see what the scam was, I gave the number a call. There was a telltale click, the fuzzy sound of a long distance line and the chirpy voice of an Indian worker (they tend to be a lot friendlier than anyone on the end of a UK phone). He asked me for my phone number. I asked him who he was and why I was texted? And while I couldn't get the full details of what whoever he worked for is trying to do I gleaned the following:

The company is called CNT

They bought the numbers for Orange customers from a source they won't divulge

They are not in the UK, but won't say where they are based

They pass on your details to a third party who then might offer you an upgrade

I don't know whether this is an outright scam to get people's personal details or one to coax people on to contracts through third party suppliers. It is however to be avoided at all costs. Remember there's no such thing as a free lunch/pay-as-you-go upgrade/lottery ticket/inheritance from a Nigerian prince.